Chihuahua state police have found the remains of more than 50 bodies at a clandestine mass grave site in a drug cartel conflict zone in a forest region in northwestern Chihuahua, authorities said.
The victims found in the mass graves could be people abducted during “a phenomenon of disappearances” taking place in the Nuevo Casas Grandes region a few years ago, Chihuahua Public Safety Secretary Gilberto Loya said at a news conference on Monday, Jan. 27.
Crime-scene investigators have been digging up human remains in various stages of decomposition in a rural mountain community named El Willy, located in Ejido Ignacio Zaragoza, about 40 miles southwest of the town of Casas Grandes.
The first remains were found on Tuesday, Jan. 21. Ten more graves were located the following day and investigators kept finding burial sites on Thursday, Jan. 23 and Friday, Jan. 24, the attorney general's office said.
A total of 56 bodies and remains had been exhumed from 38 hidden graves as of Saturday, Jan. 25, the Chihuahua Attorney General's Office said. Field work continues by investigators backed by state police and guarded by the Mexican army and National Guard.
Some of the recovered bodies had been mutilated, and in other spots, only bones and partial remains were recovered, officials said. Nine bullet casings were found. Investigators are working to determine causes of death and identification.
Photos released by the Chihuahua State Investigations Agency showed investigators in white body suit coverings digging up graves.
It has not been officially revealed how long the bodies may have been buried or what led investigators to the possible narco grave in El Willy.
Drug cartel conflicts, narco graves in Chihuahua
The mass grave site at El Willy is near the Sonora state line in a rural mountain region that, over the years, has seen conflict between drug-trafficking groups affiliated with the Sinaloa cartel and La Linea crime organization, or Juárez cartel.
The remains of a dozen bodies were found in December 2024 in a suspected "narco graveyard" in the desert near Ascensión, a small town in northwest Chihuahua located some 50 miles north of Nuevo Casas Grandes along the highway to Juárez.
In 2023, Chihuahua state police and federal forces took charge of public safety in Nuevo Casas Grandes after the suspension of the town's police department following complaints of abuses by police linked to organized crime as well as reports of disappearances in the region, Loya said.
"We understand that the people who disappeared at that time, and prior times, are likely in that grave," Loya said.
Since the state takeover, the number of reported disappearances in the region has "diminished radically," Loya added.
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